I am trying to part out a gaming rig for my brother for somewhere around 800 dollars. I have a list of stuff in mind so i'll post and see what everyone thinks. He said he won't be overclocking. He has a monitor already with a 1080p res. He said he would also like to watch a lot of movies and archive what he has.

I have already shopped around the egg and amazon. If other sites have fantastic prices I'm not against them.

I am but he is not so sadly no. I was hoping to fit an SSD into the build but when he needs everything it's proving difficult. I knew the PSU would be good my current one is similar and i'm running a 7850 without problems. It was more of a hey does someone know of similar ones that are better.

He is upgrading from an XP laptop so unfortunately not for a 40$ copy of windows

You can still do a non-upgrade installation with an upgrade disc. If it doesn't activate automatically, you just need to do a simple registry edit and voila, activated! I've done this twice and haven't had a problem on either machine.

I had considered going down to an i3 but i know he will keep this computer as long as he keeps all his other electronics, he will have it for years. The budget is loosely 800 so 50 or more over budget is fine. As it stands after price checking the components on amazon and counting the MIR before i try to add an SSD with the i5 still in the build it comes to 760$. I could fit a 90gb force gt or a 128gb crucial m4 into the budget. If he doesn't like that the i3 was next up for lowering the price.

Thatguy wrote:I had considered going down to an i3 but i know he will keep this computer as long as he keeps all his other electronics, he will have it for years. The budget is loosely 800 so 50 or more over budget is fine. As it stands after price checking the components on amazon and counting the MIR before i try to add an SSD with the i5 still in the build it comes to 760$. I could fit a 90gb force gt or a 128gb crucial m4 into the budget. If he doesn't like that the i3 was next up for lowering the price.

Keep the input coming!

Going ahead with this proposed build without an SSD just seems foolish. I would make every attempt to put one in it.

Very nice part list so far. I agree with you on the motherboard. If he's not interested in putting out money to upgrade all his devices to usb 3.0 , overclocking, or potential multi gpu set ups in the future. Than you can defiantly go cheaper on the MB. Gigabyte,asus,msi essentially all the top brands have basic 1155 mb's in the $50ish dollar range. They don't have al the enthusiast bells and whistles but for the non enthusiast performance wise there's virtually no difference. if you stick with a name brand one there mostly just as reliable. As stated before your gpu is a great choice but does have a 500w requirement. You should however be fine with the corsair 430w though. The 500w requirement they stamp on has to take in account cheap off brand power supplies they may have less than accurate ratings listed on the box. If you look at TR's review http://techreport.com/review/22705/xfx- ... cs-cards/7 the 7850 only uses 182 watts under load. If you have some bargain basement $15 "400w" psu it however may not be able to supply that much current to just the gpu . Hence why they list psu requirements much higher than actually needed.

rogue426 wrote:Going ahead with this proposed build without an SSD just seems foolish. I would make every attempt to put one in it.

I'd rather have the power without the load times than the load times without the power.

As he stated, his friend will keep this for years. I've gone from I3's to I5's and really haven't noticed much "seat of the pants" difference. I did notice a significance difference when using an SSD for my boot drives.Coming up with an extra hundred or so should be something he should seriously consider for it.

I have talked him into an SSD most likely a 90gb force gt. He has the 1tb so it's mostly a boot and most used programs drive. I finally got time to sort through motherboards today and decided he really doesn't need the one i posted and going for a non enthusiast, less bells and whistles, name brand board would help the budget and do no harm to him.

Thatguy wrote:I decided for a non enthusiast, less bells and whistles, name brand board would help the budget and do no harm to him.$77½ MSI B75MA-P45Seems like a solid board. I currently have an MSI board, in sig, and it has treated me well. It has all the new tech and none of the excess I would buy for myself.

Thatguy wrote:I decided for a non enthusiast, less bells and whistles, name brand board would help the budget and do no harm to him.$77.55 MSI B75MA-P45Seems like a solid board. I currently have an MSI board, in sig, and it has treated me well. It has all the new tech and none of the excess I would buy for myself.

Those are all nice boards but because the processor is 20$ cheaper on amazon the combo deals always end up being more expensive. The Pro4 is pretty close but all he gains is some PCI lanes which i doubt he will use and and HMDI which will be on the video card and largely irrelevant for his uses. The monitor he has is my old dell which only has DVI anyway.

I appreciate the suggestions though it gives me more options to talk to him about.

I bumped his power supply to the cx500 and upgraded to a 7870. Used the cheaper MSI board which after discussing what he needs for ports and usb plugs seems to be a perfect fit. We squeezed a 90gb force 3 SSD into it and between amazon and newegg got everything ordered for 928.10. 40$ worth of MIR and i think we accomplished what we set out to do!

The Pro4 is pretty close but all he gains is some PCI lanes which I doubt he will use and and HMDI which will be on the video card and largely irrelevant for his uses.

Free shipping makes the more feature-rich H77 motherboard less expensive than the B75 board.

How did i miss this post?!

I ordered the board from amazon for 64.99 the processor for 20 less than what newegg and i put the case in there because i signed up for the 1 month free amazon prime so free 2 day shipping taking 10$ shipping on the order from newegg!